3-D Fashion Spreads: Outta This World, or One-Trick Ponies?

This was a long time coming. Last year, both Archetype and Dazed and Confused magazines toyed with the public’s 3-D obsession, popping out punchy multidimensional fashion spreads and experimenting with eyeball-twisting covers. Shortly thereafter, Mexican Vogue and Chinese Harper’s Bazaar also hitched rides on the 3-D bandwagon, proving to everyone within gawking distance that swimsuit models look even hotter when they’re come-hithering two inches from your face (a trick that, unfortunately, didn’t translate very well online). And now, every editorial image, plus twenty advertisements, in this week’s issue of Time Out New York, which hit newsstands yesterday, is full-on three-dimensional — including a playful shopping story on the galaxy-print trend.

All of which raises the question: Is 3-D (as well as other interactive novelties like V magazine’s new scratch-off cover) the future of fashion, or just a cheap gimmick employed by print outlets desperate to capitalize on their medium’s hold-it-in-your-hands tangibility? More importantly, when are we going to see a hyper-meta, three-dimensional spread of Karlie Kloss and the Kaiser live-tweeting while luxuriating in a bathtub filled with Veuve Clicquot, each wearing gold-rimmed, chain-embellished 3-D glasses we can Text2Buy with a snap of our camera phone?